Evaluating Information Retrieval and Access Tasks

This open access book summarizes the first two decades of the NII Testbeds and Community for Information access Research (NTCIR). NTCIR is a series of evaluation forums run by a global team of researchers and hosted by the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan. The book is unique in that it discusses not just what was done at NTCIR, but also how it was done and the impact it has achieved. For example, in some chapters the reader sees the early seeds of what eventually grew to be the search engines that provide access to content on the World Wide Web, today’s smartphones that can tailor what they show to the needs of their owners, and the smart speakers that enrich our lives at home and on the move. We also get glimpses into how new search engines can be built for mathematical formulae, or for the digital record of a lived human life. Key to the success of the NTCIR endeavor was early recognition that information access research is an empirical discipline and that evaluation therefore lay at the core of the enterprise. Evaluation is thus at the heart of each chapter in this book. They show, for example, how the recognition that some documents are more important than others has shaped thinking about evaluation design. The thirty-three contributors to this volume speak for the many hundreds of researchers from dozens of countries around the world who together shaped NTCIR as organizers and participants. This book is suitable for researchers, practitioners, and students—anyone who wants to learn about past and present evaluation efforts in information retrieval, information access, and natural language processing, as well as those who want to participate in an evaluation task or even to design and organize one

A Survey of GPT-3 Family Large Language Models Including ChatGPT and GPT-4

Large language models (LLMs) are a special class of pretrained language models obtained by scaling model size, pretraining corpus and computation. LLMs, because of their large size and pretraining on large volumes of text data, exhibit special abilities which allow them to achieve remarkable performances without any task-specific training in many of the natural language processing tasks. The era of LLMs started with OpenAI GPT-3 model, and the popularity of LLMs is increasing exponentially after the introduction of models like ChatGPT and GPT4. We refer to GPT-3 and its successor OpenAI models, including ChatGPT and GPT4, as GPT-3 family large language models (GLLMs). With the ever-rising popularity of GLLMs, especially in the research community, there is a strong need for a comprehensive survey which summarizes the recent research progress in multiple dimensions and can guide the research community with insightful future research directions. We start the survey paper with foundation concepts like transformers, transfer learning, self-supervised learning, pretrained language models and large language models. We then present a brief overview of GLLMs and discuss the performances of GLLMs in various downstream tasks, specific domains and multiple languages. We also discuss the data labelling and data augmentation abilities of GLLMs, the robustness of GLLMs, the effectiveness of GLLMs as evaluators, and finally, conclude with multiple insightful future research directions. To summarize, this comprehensive survey paper will serve as a good resource for both academic and industry people to stay updated with the latest research related to GPT-3 family large language models.Comment: Preprint under review, 58 page

بناء أداة تفاعلية متعددة اللغات لاسترجاع المعلومات

The growing requirement on the Internet have made users access to the information expressed in a language other than their own , which led to Cross lingual information retrieval (CLIR) .CLIR is established as a major topic in Information Retrieval (IR). One approach to CLIR uses different methods of translation to translate queries to documents and indexes in other languages. As queries submitted to search engines suffer lack of untranslatable query keys (i.e., words that the dictionary is missing) and translation ambiguity, which means difficulty in choosing between alternatives of translation. Our approach in this thesis is to build and develop the software tool (MORTAJA-IR-TOOL) , a new tool for retrieving information using programming JAVA language with JDK 1.6. This tool has many features, which is develop multiple systematic languages system to be use as a basis for translation when using CLIR, as well as the process of stemming the words entered in the query process as a stage preceding the translation process. The evaluation of the proposed methodology translator of the query comparing it with the basic translation that uses readable dictionary automatically the percentage of improvement is 8.96%. The evaluation of the impact of the process of stemming the words entered in the query on the quality of the output process in the retrieval of matched data in other process the rate of improvement is 4.14%. Finally the rated output of the merger between the use of stemming methodology proposed and translation process (MORTAJA-IR-TOOL) which concluded that the proportion of advanced in the process of improvement in data rate of retrieval is 15.86%. Keywords: Cross lingual information retrieval, CLIR, Information Retrieval, IR, Translation, stemming.الاحتياجات المتنامية على شبكة الإنترنت جعلت المستخدمين لهم حق الوصول إلى المعلومات بلغة غير لغتهم الاصلية، مما يقودنا الى مصطلح عبور اللغات لاسترجاع المعلومات (CLIR). CLIR أنشئت كموضوع رئيسي في "استرجاع المعلومات" (IR). نهج واحد ل CLIR يستخدم أساليب مختلفة للترجمة ومنها لترجمة الاستعلامات وترجمة الوثائق والفهارس في لغات أخرى. الاستفسارات والاستعلامات المقدمة لمحركات البحث تعاني من عدم وجود ترجمه لمفاتيح الاستعلام (أي أن العبارة مفقودة من القاموس) وايضا تعاني من غموض الترجمة، مما يعني صعوبة في الاختيار بين بدائل الترجمة. في نهجنا في هذه الاطروحة تم بناء وتطوير الأداة البرمجية (MORTAJA-IR-TOOL) أداة جديدة لاسترجاع المعلومات باستخدام لغة البرمجة JAVA مع JDK 1.6، وتمتلك هذه الأداة العديد من الميزات، حيث تم تطوير منظومة منهجية متعددة اللغات لاستخدامها كأساس للترجمة عند استخدام CLIR، وكذلك عملية تجذير للكلمات المدخلة في عملية الاستعلام كمرحلة تسبق عملية الترجمة. وتم تقييم الترجمة المنهجية المقترحة للاستعلام ومقارنتها مع الترجمة الأساسية التي تستخدم قاموس مقروء اليا كأساس للترجمة في تجربة تركز على المستخدم وكانت نسبة التحسين 8.96% , وكذلك يتم تقييم مدى تأثير عملية تجذير الكلمات المدخلة في عملية الاستعلام على جودة المخرجات في عملية استرجاع البيانات المتطابقة باللغة الاخرى وكانت نسبة التحسين 4.14% , وفي النهاية تم تقييم ناتج عملية الدمج بين استخدام التجذير والترجمة المنهجية المقترحة (MORTAJA-IR-TOOL) والتي خلصت الى نسبة متقدمة في عملية التحسين في نسبة البيانات المرجعة وكانت 15.86%

Computational approaches to semantic change (Volume 6)

Semantic change — how the meanings of words change over time — has preoccupied scholars since well before modern linguistics emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century, ushering in a new methodological turn in the study of language change. Compared to changes in sound and grammar, semantic change is the least understood. Ever since, the study of semantic change has progressed steadily, accumulating a vast store of knowledge for over a century, encompassing many languages and language families. Historical linguists also early on realized the potential of computers as research tools, with papers at the very first international conferences in computational linguistics in the 1960s. Such computational studies still tended to be small-scale, method-oriented, and qualitative. However, recent years have witnessed a sea-change in this regard. Big-data empirical quantitative investigations are now coming to the forefront, enabled by enormous advances in storage capability and processing power. Diachronic corpora have grown beyond imagination, defying exploration by traditional manual qualitative methods, and language technology has become increasingly data-driven and semantics-oriented. These developments present a golden opportunity for the empirical study of semantic change over both long and short time spans